Death Gate now returns the Death Knight to a location near their original departure point when the spell is cast while in Ebon Hold.

Blood

Riposte is a new passive ability learned by Blood Death Knights at level 76. When the Death Knight dodges or parries any attack, they gain 75% of their Parry and Dodge as additional bonus to Critical Strike for 20 seconds.

Invoke Xuen, the White Tiger now has a pet control bar for Xuen, and the talent is no longer on global cooldown for all Monk specializations. summoned version of Xuen will no longer Taunt off players that are tank-specialized.

Divine Plea no longer reduces the amount of healing done, and now restores mana based on the Paladin’s Spirit.

Guardian of the Ancient Kings (Holy version) now deals additional healing based on any heal cast by the Paladin for the 15 seconds for the duration of the spell. The Paladin also has 10% additional haste for the duration that the ability is active.

Glyph of Blind now only removes damage-over-time effects that would cause Blind to break. For Rogues that also have the Dirty Tricks talent, this means Blind will no longer remove the Rogue’s poison or bleed effects.

Archimonde's Vengeance has been redesigned and renamed into Archimonde's Darkness. Archimonde's Darkness gives the Warlock's Dark Soul spell two charges. For the passive portion of the talent, each time the Warlock or their pet takes damage, the Warlock now gains 1% of the unmitigated damage back as spell power for 20 seconds.

Soul Link now transfers 20% of damage taken by the Warlock to their pet, and 3% of all damage dealt by the Warlock will be returned as healing for the Warlock and their pet. This ability is always active while the Warlock's pet is active.

Riposte is a new passive ability learned by Protection Warriors at level 76. When the Warrior dodges or parries any attack, they gain 75% of their Parry and Dodge as an additional bonus to Critical Strike for 20 seconds.

Ultimatum now activates from critical hits with Shield Slam instead of a flat 20% chance, and the ability will make the next Heroic Strike or Cleave be a critical hit in addition to costing no Rage.

Pet Battles

Pet Battle General

Battle Pet Training cost and the price of pets sold by Battle Pet Trainers have been greatly reduced.

Battle Pets

Tiny Twister: The Sandstorm ability has been replaced with Call Lightning.

Battle Pet Abilities

Battle Pet abilities with a component that increases in damage every time it hits will no longer reset when an opponent's pet gets swapped. (Arcane Blast, Frog Kiss, etc.)

Death Grip cooldown increased to 4 rounds (up from 3 rounds), damage has been reduced by 50%, and hit chance has been reduced to match similar abilities.

Nether Gate damage has been reduced by 33%.

Sweep damage has been reduced by 33%.

Blue Tweets

Originally Posted by Blizzard Entertainment

ClassesAs heal I hate this "nonstop AOE heal spam" playstyle for example.
We do think AE heal spam has gotten out of control again. The healer tookit lacks depth when single target heals are ignored. (Source)
It's challenging because every time we nerf AEs, rather than going to single-target heals, healers just feel too weak to heal. (Source)

Stop giving abilities 2charges, it's a dumb system..
Why do you think so? We like the system since it lets you hold a CD rather than using it ASAP. (Source)

New minor glyphs are nice. ... But some classes ALREADY have too many mandatory minor glyphs, and no room for cosmetic ones
What is a mandatory minor glyph? (Source)

are you concerned people are playing specs that sim the highest spa and not the specs they enjoy the most?
Yes. I don't think it's healthy for the game but it's a hard mentality to fight. (Source)
For almost all of us, 1% more DPS is not the difference between success or failure. Playing well is. (Source)
For almost all of us, the top 100 on Raidbots is not a reflection of what we can do on an encounter. Even more so for sims. (Source)

in the world of bring the player not the class shouldn't http://t.co/s32qQttF4q be equivalent to lust and not weaker?
If the goal was that you had all buffs regardless of comp then we'd just give them all passively. (Source)Isn't this raid buff thing mostly there to shit on 10m raids? 25s get them all by accident.
Buffs are there to make you feel stronger in a group and to encourage some level of raid diversity. (Source)I just don't see why mark fort and now hero, which we have like 3 copies of each, are handed out, but we gotta struggle.
The original idea with Mark and Fort was that tank survivability is balanced around having those. (Source)
It's harder to tell a tank to survive better the way you can usually coax a little more from DPS. (Source)
But in MoP I'm not sure the distinction is that relevant anymore. (Source)

Don't you think that cooldowns/trinkets are too high? a 250k Chaos Bolt normal going to 900k with procs, isn't that too much?
We do worry that the synergistic effects of lining up CDs with trinkets has grown too large. Lining up shouldn't trump everything. (Source)Personally I think there are just too many cooldowns+trinkets. I'd rather have one big cooldown I use than 4 I have to line up
Yeah, it's a cause of button bloat for sure. Does Ret need AW and GoAK? Does Fury need Skull Banner and Recklessness? (Source)

Death Knight (Forums / Skills / Talent Calculator)Does the solo Sha kill still not prove how broken blood is? It's still current content and this has been every xpac.
Lei Shen is current content. Sha is many ilevels ago. What is the specific issue that offends you here? How does it hurt you? (Source)

Druid (Forums / Skills / Talent Calculator)Will we ever be able to have hybrid talents trees like we did long ago? I.e. Some spec skills from resto on moonkin = Restokin
With the druid talents in particular we tried to offer healing options to Balance and so on. (Source)

When will Resto Druid Glyph of Efflorescence be on PTR? Is this glyph being rethought?
Our concern is that Swiftmend went from being a great ST heal to part of the AE healing kit. Maybe that wasn't the right call. (Source)What exactly does that mean? That doesn't really answer the question...
The answer is yes it is being rethought because we're debating the old vs new role for Swiftmend. No decisions yet. (Source)

Hunter (Forums / Skills / Talent Calculator) Removing SS as a talent will cripple BM and SV in PvP, forcing hunters into MM if they want to be able to compete in PvP
So BM for example can have a trinket or a silence. Seems fair. You really need both? When does anyone get a chance to counter? (Source)you do realize that you gave hunter trinket and silence in the first place right? youre arguing with yourself now
Right. That's why we made the change. The original 5.0 talent design was crazy generous to BM PvP. (Source)will we have some dmg buff on kill command in 5.4 ? and you guys think of baking widow venom in serpent sting ?
Long term, we agree Widow Venom needs some work. Short term not thrilled with the idea of e.g. Serpent Spread + Widow Venom. (Source)

Why is Snake Trap still in the game? It does like 300 dps on level 90. It's completely useless.
We agree it needs a better niche. Reluctant to yank it since it has a unique kit vs. the 200 spells in the game named Frost X. (Source)

The tooltip says "preventing any spell in that school from being cast for 3 sec" so yes.
You can also use Silencing Shot preemptively to stop the cast, while Counter Shot has to land during the cast. (Source)

Talking with several hunters, agreement that Readiness going away is fine if other spells are adjusted as well.
We're thinking 2 charges on Deterrence and Disengage, then other buffs to things like Kill Command. (Source)Wouldn't that be a big buff with the talented 1min Deter? 1min and 5min Deter vs both are up in 2mins?
Charges just gives them what they have today with Readiness, though IIRC the base CDS are longer. (Source)
This is an example where I am expressing design intent (no Readiness) and not tuning... yet. (Source)

what's the real difference between counter shot and silencing shot?
The silence...? (Source)

Have you seen this post detailing some concerns about hunters? http://t.co/NlAMMnOwjPIt has some nice points.
We are pretty happy with raid utility for all specs. Every class asks for more to guarantee a raid spot. (Source)What utility do hunters offer in 25m or even well organized 10m that another class or two don't already bring?
That is true of everyone but warlocks, who probably bring too much. (Source)

Stampede was never intended to provide utility. It's a DPS cooldown. (Source)It's now a 20 second DOT on a 5 minute CD that is worth 1% of our total damage. Least compelling CD in the game?
Do keep in mind that total damage and damage per second both have different benefits. (Source)Do keep in mind that it is our 87 ability, and it is exactly like Dire Beast. "Insulting" is the word.
So how much damage do you think Stampede needs to do to be fair? (Source)

Will you EVER get rid of arcane shot for spec unique dumps? It's a remnant from days of Hunter mana; Please remove
Having different focus dumps would help with spec distinction. (Source)

Mage (Forums / Skills / Talent Calculator)They think Frost PvP is "balanced" as is on PTR and that people enjoy the RNG of Fire and the poor scaling of Frost.
We try not to tell you what you enjoy. We design specs and encourage you to play the spec(s) that appeal to you the most. (Source)
When players try to redesign specs too much we worry they're just looking for something different than we're offering. (Source)

Excuse Masta, he's a bit pissed (as I am, though to be fair). If you can overhaul warlock talents, why not Mage???
It's just a matter of degree. KJC and AV risked breaking all of our encounters. (Source)

54% crit as fire with CM, zero heroic gear, hit/haste staff. (ilvl528). 5.4 scaling problems? Same old CM nerf inc or plans?
Don't know yet. It's cool to have crit -> something cool happens, but we're souring on the whole weak until X%, then OP design. (Source)
We had the same problem with warriors previously. Just feels like crit has to be between say 30 and 70% for the design to work. (Source)WoW's problem has become that for y=mx+c 'm' is too large and 'c' is too small. MoP T16 has 3x stats of H 5m
Are you saying that about Fire or as some kind of generic problem? (Source)
Because we like huge gear jumps between tiers. Allows us to challenge the best guilds and those that come later (with more gear). (Source)

Monk (Forums / Skills / Talent Calculator)WW needs something besides dps to offer. Every other melee has a raid cooldown, major raid healing or both. WW has neither.
The utility arms race won't end well. Someone will always have the best and others will still want more to compete. (Source)

And if you haven't already a good thread regarding concerns and discussion on the changes as well
The intent isn't to nerf WW overall -- we're not finished yet. It will end up with Rune just being good instead of crazy OP. (Source)
On the flip side, you won't be so dependent on Rune (or any specific trinket). (Source)

Paladin (Forums / Skills / Talent Calculator)You need to understand LoD is too weak and you tuned SoO encounters to favor hots(EF). On no boss so far would LoD outdo EF.
Paladins survived for years without hots. We don't buy that they are utterly dependent on a talent that is like a year old. (Source)

(continued) we do it because the alternative doesn't exist. When u floored Holy Radiance u made the 3hp finisher too important
If the finishers aren't good, we find paladins just spam the builders and ignore the finishers, which feels bad too. (Source)

To continue, we don't want every paladin playing like a Resto druid, and honestly neither should you paladins. EF shouldn't be mandatory. (Source)Agree100%. I am growing to hate having to take EF. Every fight my top heal is an absorb. Should just play my Disc priest.
Exactly. We don't argue it's effective. But we question whether it's really fun or fits the paladin kit. (Source)
If you recall, EF was limit one until very late in MoP beta. It's an example of a change we should not have made so late. (Source)
Obviously had big consequences. (Source)

you fked up prots in PvP because of all qq from none tank players.. you need to be fired
Do you realize you won't have any opponents in PvP for long if you're having tons of fun and they aren't? (Source)
Tanks in PvP are "you can't kill me" which is super frustrating for everyone else. If there's another design we're open to it. (Source)

+10% on LoD won't help much, increase the amount of targets hit and increase holy radiance's 6 target cap in 25man.
We don't like non-CD AE heals with huge target caps. Trying it with HR only because we want Resto to be awesome when clumped. (Source)

Then give us something to use as an alternative, the other two talents in that tier are a joke, at best.
We buffed SH a lot for Holy. Looking at what we can do to SS for them. (Source)

Don't want to play like a druid, either. Concerned about number balance since EF hot/shield accounts for so much on live
Yes. Our strategy is to try to buff LoD w/out killing WoG or EF. (Source)

i still dont understand why paladins are getting a fear when we have repentance, unless its instant n1 will go for it
PvP balance has a great deal to do with team synergy, not the tools of the individual. Fears are a valuable and hard to get DR. (Source)

Healer balance is looking good! Feels like Shaman, Druids, Monks, and Priests are going into 5.4 feeling good. Pallies need <3
Going to try DP scaling with Spirit. GoAK with AE heals. Maybe buff to WoG, EF, LoD. (Source)Clarifications from Lore seems great. I hope the change to GoAK will be an overall buff. Also 40y on LoD would be nice.
The intent is that GoAK is a buff. We agree that it's a lot of single-target overhealing in today's environment. (Source)
Considered lowering the CD, but we'd have to nerf the HPS and it would also get macro'd with Divine Favor a lot. (Source)What HPS? Paladin HPS is bad on the PTR.The updated GoAk on a 5min cd is hardly going to be enough to push that up.
Do you have any logs or other data to support that? It's unfortunately too easy just to tweet for buffs with no support. (Source)

Not nearly enough to compensate for SoI sadly.
We didn't balance Holy around 100% SoI usage because we knew that was unrealistic. We balanced them around DP. (Source)
For Prot, we buffed Guarded by the Light to 15% mana return to compensate for SoI. (Source)Guys are making of mess of the last patch. Should of done this retooling with an expansion.
It's often a tough balance. Many players want their issues fixed NOW and don't want to wait an indeterminate time in the future. (Source)

These are reassuring words. Any chance that for Holy SoI/BattleHealer and Judgment could scale for SelflH use?
Might try Selfless Healer gives Judgment Holy Power for Holy, but nervous about that one. (Source)

Divine Plea no longer reduces healing in 5.4. Truth/datamine? What about Glyph of Divine Plea--changing?
Truth (at least for the moment - anything could change). Not sure of glyph future yet. (Source)

Holy Paladins are lacking in the PTR 5.4 at the moment. Any hope for compensation considering the Eternal Flame nerfs we got ?
EF, like GoSac and KJC are intended as rule-breaking talents. We want to see some players use them but not all. (Source)It's funny, the talents that the warlock community, on average, liked the most, y'all hate and decided to destroy
I feel like they liked them because they made the class easy to play without a corresponding DPS loss. (Source)

t16 4pc for ret is really boring gameplay. Button lights up = press it when a free gcd = not fun.
Did you find your t15 TVs hitting harder to be more engaging? Seems even easier to ignore. (Source)

Priest (Forums / Skills / Talent Calculator)Holy word:Sanctuary performs awful, increasing the reduced amount and radius insteadof reduce the mana cost is better.
Sanc isn't intended to be a go to AE spell. It is intended to be layered with other spells to be ticking while they do. (Source)
Too much buffing and it becomes like Healing Rain, a big weapon in the Resto toolkit. But that's not what we want for Sanc. (Source)

speaking of healing is holy priest ever going to be as good as disc again?
You have to define good. Holy is a great healer and better than Disc in some fights. Atonement makes Disc very popular in 10s. (Source)
And Atonement itself isn't OP, but the ease with which Disc can swap from DPS healing to shielding is quite useful (esp in 10s). (Source)

Dear crabby, is there any news regarding Divine Hymn becoming baseline again for all priest specs?
We don't really think Disc or Shadow need more CDs or utility, respectively. (Source)

with the recent changes to apparitions on the ptr, is there also a movement speed increase to them? Or would it not be needed?
We don't want them to move super fast or they become just another missile. Shouldn't have big pathing problems anymore though. (Source)whats wrong with JUST ANOTHER missile? its gona be the only missile shadowpriest has. STOP discriminating ffs
Resistance to making everything the same is not the same as discrimination. We don't want SA to be Shadow Bolt. (Source)

Limited, too. 30 sec Chakra CD makes it tough to be flexible.
We could consider lowering CD, but we don't want "Chakra twisting" every time you want to cast e.g. CoH. (Source)

Any plans on giving disc divine hymh back? maybe make it share a cooldown with PW:B?
Feel like Disc needs more limitations, not more tools. (Source)

Is Holy Priests' HW: Sanc ever going to be looked at number wise? It's pretty terrible and even with new 4set won't be used.
It is meant to be layered along with PoH etc. so both are happening at once. It isn't intended as a high priority AE heal. (Source)

Holy regen is too low. Disc mp5 is very comfortable indeed, but nerfing it wouldn't solve the low holy regen.
We are worried that Holy regen is where the other healers are but that Disc can largely ignore mana. (Source)

it seems for rogues this coming tier combat is looking less desirable than sub in raids. Is this the intent?
Are you basing that on anything other than DPS (which isn't tuned for 5.4 yet)? (Source)

Shaman (Forums / Skills / Talent Calculator)What use does the Conductivity Change have if you cant have 2 Healing Rains at a time?
It isn't intended to let you splash rains around the entire raid, and technically the spell cannot even work that way. (Source)
The idea is you can keep HR going without spending the cast time just by casting other spells. (Source)Why buff HR when we're already good in packed situations? Isn't HTT nerf making us weaker in spread situations? CH still slow
We like that Resto shaman look at the battlefield and not just the target frames. (Source)
We'd rather make them stronger while grouped than just like everyone else. (Source)Would you agree Shaman should be superior than every other healer when stacked to justify poor spread healing?
Yes. That is the intent. Just need to rectify that with e.g. SCK. (Source)

Resto Shaman are lacking in the PTR 5.4 at the moment. Any hope for compensation considering the poor spread healing we got ?
We understand players will say that's not enough, but we still want shaman to care about grouping and to perform better then. (Source)Make chaining glyph baseline with no CD for resto.
No CD means your rotation would likely turn into CH CH CH CH CH CH. It was that way once.... (Source)Also, if CH is being spam, that implies other abilities aren't good enough and should be buffed so CH doesn't HAVE to be spam
That argues that no spell needs a cooldown, just buffs to other spells. We don't think rotations work that way. (Source)But the thing about grouping is that we are losing even on those fights to ppl who have better spread healing.
Yes. This is what we're trying to fix. (Source)

Warlock (Forums / Skills / Talent Calculator)What's the story behind affliction changes? Just curious, I'm guessing it's because they rely on fillers and not the DoTs?
Wanted to nerf MG a little bit and buff dots since you can't always MG (especially in PvP). Still want MG to be good of course. (Source)

Warrior (Forums / Skills / Talent Calculator)GC, i think Revenge needs an increased cleave range. Its a little dumb the ability not hitting secondary targets some times.
Possibly. I can't recall of the top of my head. Is the range 5 or 8? (Source)

Can bladestorm be baseline to arms please. It was an iconic arms ability and now we just can't afford to take it in PvP
We'd rather get it to a point where it's competitive in PvP. Baking in talents and adding new ones leads to button bloat. (Source)

Actually, changing stances every couple of seconds was exactly what made warrior gameplay so fun and engaging
It was a very common request to remove the old stance restrictions. Lots of "no other class has this liability" etc. (Source)

You guys really like Arms rotation? it works but it's... really boring to spam OP. op could be our revenge proc TFB changed?
Wouldn't you run into a lot of MS -> empty GCD? (Source)

Any plans on bringing the sunder armor debuff up to date? I dont think anyone has spent the gcds/rage on actual Sunder in mop
Maybe have CS and Devastate apply Sunder and cut the core ability. (Source)

Weekly News Recap
Another busy week, another chance to catch up on what you missed!

don't see what the big deal is about chakra. you're not meant to have all the benefits all of the time. i usually just pick which one will help most for a fight and stay in it. everything works just fine. i think there's too much obsessing over 1% differences in the end totals. if there's a phase of the fight where you really need the other one then just switch. it's not like there's 50 phases to a boss that happen every 10 seconds.

About time Readiness was removed. Now they can actually balance the class in both PVE and PVP, and we won't have a 20 button opener.

Don't worry, they already said they will be buffing KC, ES, etc to make up for it... that PTR patch just hasn't happened yet. It's going to be a sustained DPS buff, but less burst. Overall better in my opinion.

That's the point: "It is kinda funny how they push out ugly tier sets now but as soon as its something they can earn more extra money from they make it amazing."

They make shit in the game to buy from their web-shop awesome things (what contains work hours, not just copy paste work)...
You pay for the expansion packs/2 years, you pay tons of cold money for months (to get CHANCE to do something) and after that, if you don't like the crap low polygon-numbers items you need to pay again to get some shine...

The gear this tier is some of the ugliest I have ever seen. I have yet to see a single class set (season and tier) that doesn't look completely disgusting, gaudy, not right for the intended class, etc.

don't see what the big deal is about chakra. you're not meant to have all the benefits all of the time. i usually just pick which one will help most for a fight and stay in it. everything works just fine. i think there's too much obsessing over 1% differences in the end totals. if there's a phase of the fight where you really need the other one then just switch. it's not like there's 50 phases to a boss that happen every 10 seconds.

The fact that you can barely help out tankhealing in 25man is not a big deal? In 25man it's small issue though since you have other healers, in 10man it's terrible though because you are not supposed to just spam aoe heals and need to keep some targets up. More the other way around, your PoH are so damn weak in 10man since you cannot really switch if you know tank is gonna take a beating soon. Glad I'm raiding 25man now and don't have to worry about Chakra anymore other than Horridon's last phase.

The thing is other healers can alternate between roles in a heartbeat, but we need to be in the right Chakra to heal JUST AS MUCH as the other healer. The problems appear the most when both singletarget and aoe healing are needed, why should we be handicapped if while heavy aoe dmg the tank gets low and we try to throw it a heal? Or why is our cascade etc being made weaker in singletarget Chakra in 10man? Can't really switch for 1 spell and back now can you.
So during heavy AoE damage and the tank gets low: Oops our gheal hit only for 60k instead of the 120k the other chakra/healers would've done and now the tank died, thanks Chakra. A lot of phases do not always last 30 seconds so you are going to lose essential healing and during an AoE healing phase (which is..always..in 25man) you cannot really switch.
Reducing the cooldown would be worse as a stancedancing healer would not be fun to play, so the last option remains is removing it, people asking for it for years now but of course they don't listen.

On another note, I'm starting to dislike that I cannot even take a 1/2month break from my alts before having to TOTALLY relearn them, like someone said it's like rolling a new class each patch now.

Am i the only strange 1 who actuallly enjoy's class changes as i think they stop the game from becoming stale. constantly relearning how to play for me is fun. and in the end if my toons are strong or weak doesnt really matter. ill still play them. love the game, starting to get tired of the qq though